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Dr. Catherine Musemeche, who lives in Austin, has had a 30-year career as a pediatric surgeon. She’s also a lawyer and has worked in the specialty of medical devices. She’s been an assistant professor at the University of Texas Medical School in Houston. And she’s a writer.

Now she turns the many aspects of her career into the book “Small: Life and Death on the Front Lines of Pediatric Surgery.” She’ll talk about the book, what a pediatric surgeon does exactly and her admiration for parents at BookPeople on Thursday.

She’s a Longhorn through and through. Her undergraduate, medical and legal degrees are all from the University of Texas.

The book is a love letter to many of the pediatric surgeons who came before her and who were her colleagues. She writes about people like C. Everett Koop, the former U.S. surgeon general who was one of the pioneers of the specialty, and Dr. Barbara Barlow, who was tired of seeing kids come into her operating room in Harlem with injuries and worked to prevent them by building more than 100 safe playgrounds in the area.

Most people have no idea what a pediatric surgeon does, she says. Often, they think she’s a regular surgeon or a pediatrician who treats ear infections and sore throats. Pediatric surgeons can operate on anything from an ingrown toenail to a gunshot wound in a child, she says. “Kids are not just smaller versions of an adult,” she says. “There’s so much different about them.” Kids get different diseases at different rates and have different abnormalities, she says, which is why having a surgeon who specializes in them is important.

Each chapter highlights one amazing innovation and the pediatric surgeon behind it. Musemeche says when she first started, many of the tools of the specialty had not really changed in 40 years, but in the last 20 years, there’s been a technology explosion. In five to 10 years, she believes we’ll have the ability to grow patient-specific organs for babies who were born without them or with a defect. Doctors already have been able to correct some abnormalities in utero.

“What we’re able to do is just amazing,” she says. “To interrupt a malformation as it is occurring is revolutionary.”

She also writes about the amount of time it takes to get through the FDA regulation process to get a new technique or device approved. It becomes even more difficult when the device or procedure is for a relatively rare condition. There might not be enough test subjects to work on.

The hardest part about being a pediatric surgeon is when the advances just aren’t there and you are not able to fix something. “You think about all the repercussions for that child and that family,” she says.

There are many times when there are not good options. That’s when it’s especially important for the surgeon to talk to parents about the pros and cons of a procedure and the realities of any decision. She usually is upfront and tells them, “’We don’t have a good option here. They’re both scary.’ We both have to live with it, although they have to live with it longer than I do.”

Even with all the technology, one of the best assets is the parents. “Everyone should be issued a set of parents going into the hospital,” she says.

She watches parents evolve the more she works with them and the more the health crisis becomes part of their everyday life. “You watch them go from deer in the headlights to a resilient pillar of strength that will move heaven and earth to get the very best care for their child. … Parents don’t give up.”

Her best piece of advice for parents is that they get all their questions answered. “Be sure you have the information you need to satisfy yourself to go forward,” she says. “If you have any doubts, ask for more information or get a second opinion.”